I try to keep my feelers out on the world of the arts¹.
I follow a fair number of comedians, illustrators, poets, writers, and musicians on social media to keep myself up to date with whats going on at the leading edge of the creative world. I’m also in a group called Queer Creatives who meet online every fortnight to learn about aspects of queer media and the arts².
I’m mentioning all those facts upfront as an explainer for how I came across this story of a performance which initially I thought would be great inspiration for a magic act and in hindsight may have simply been a magic act.
The person who posted this gave me persmission to talk about this on the condition that I didn’t link back to them or reveal their identity³.
As background, I don’t know the full story but this story happens at some kind of immersive theatre experience, lots of people sharing a space with a number of actors amongst them, presumably to uphold some fiction within the space. I don’t know what that fiction was, because the only thing they posted, and all I read was the following story:
I had been hanging out at the party for about 90 minutes when one of the actors came over and asked me to come with her. She led me to a bookcase at the back of the bar and knocked three times. We stood there for a minute or so and then the bookcase slid open to reveal a darkened chamber. I was told to go in alone. I did. The bookcase shut behind me, leaving me in total darkness.
A bright LED flashlight clicked on in front of me. I was asked if I had any allergies or medical problems. I was told I should not touch anyone in the upcoming experience unless invited to or speak unless prompted to, and asked if I gave my consent to be touched. After I did so, I was given a waiver form to sign. I was then given a piece of paper that had a short poem about “Lady Spade.” I was asked to read it aloud.
I was then led ahead down a completely darkened corridor and around a corner. There was a tiny corner bar with a tall man slumped over it. I was asked to put the card with the poem down on the bar. When I did so, my guide briefly shined a black light on it briefly revealing the text “SHE LIVES IN HIS THROAT.” At this point, my guide left the room.
The sleeping man stirred and stood up, coughing and tenderly touching his throat. He asked to see my left hand. He had a deep baritone British accent. Said people were worried about me. He began to shuffle a deck of cards and said he was going to do a word association game and I should say the first word that came into my head. He said “flame,” I said “candle.” “Pillow” I said “sleep.” “Water”I said “pipe.” “Throat” I said “touch.”
He keeps coughing and touching his throat as if he’s in pain. He finishes shuffling and splits the deck. Says we’re going to play a game called Lady Spade. When he counts to 3, we both should flip cards face up. I do so. The very first hand, he draws a queen of spades. He holds it up and asks me at what point is it justified to take someone’s life. I tell him I don’t think I’m qualified to answer. He take a skewer and impales the card.
We continue playing. Whoever has the highest card takes them both. If we ever draw the same number, we play Rock, Paper, Scissors to decide the winner. Everything skids to a halt when a queen card is played though. Queen of Diamonds he asks me at what age is someone responsible for their actions. I say 10. He crumples the card up and throws it as far as he can.
Queen of Clubs, he asks me if I’ve ever been a victim of a crime. I say yes. He lights a match and burns the card. Queen of Hearts, he asks if I’m rich. I say no. He puts a cup of black liquid in front of me and tells me to “drown her.” I put the card in. He looks annoyed. He puts his hands on top of mine pushing the card down. “Hold her down” he says. He keeps coughing and touching his throat in what looks like intensifying pain.
Final hand of the game, we both draw Queens of Spades. He looks excited by this. He asks me my word association words again. “Candle” “sleep” “water” “pipe.” He asks to look at my hand again. He keeps asking me to repeat the words. He guides my hand up to his throat, forcing my fingers to wrap around it as if I’m to strangle him. He looks ghoulishly ecstatic. He’s screaming the words now.
There’s a knock from where I entered. He lets my hand fall. He says he thinks I’m going to be fine. He takes my Queen of Spades and writes on it in blue sharpie and says if anyone asks, I should tell them I’m going to be fine. A man comes and escorts me back to the bookcase. He asks me how it went. I told him I’m supposed to tell him I’m going to be fine. He smirks and says I should be telling “everyone out there.”
The bookcase opened, I left with my card. That was it.
Now as I read this for the first time I thought I was reading an account of a magic trick and wondering how it would end. It has all the hallmarks of a magic trick: a shuffled deck, importance placed upon certain cards, a convoluted dealing procedure, and women being mutilated. As a magician and puzzle head, all the way through I was trying to figure out how it was going to end. Somehow the queens would come back together at the finale, still wet and crinkled and scorched and pierced. But no, there is no crescendo. Our protagonist is sent on their way with a cryptic message and a souvenir of something difficult to explain.
So of course my next thought was what I would have done in that scenario. Like think about it, its a tabled closeup setting where you have a single spectator and an ideal ambience for doing fucked up shit like stealing people’s names or supernaturally murdering their acquaintances. Maybe I’d open with something small and intimate like Ben Hart’s matchstick trick, which has to be performed in the dark. How many opportunities do you get to perform intimate close-up in the dark?
I started to formulate the kind of weird plots you could do there, with an implicit setting of a weird encounter you wouldn’t need to fit any magical tropes, you wouldn’t have to be charming or crack jokes, you could invent any plot or premise you wouldn’t even need a climactic finale. This is exactly the kind of ergodic magic I’ve been talking about.
And that’s when I realised. This performance was a magic trick the whole time.
Think about it, the deck has been shuffled but contains 3 queens of spades, one of which turns up in the first deal, and the last pair of which come out together at the very end. That’s too narrative to have happened by chance. The performer splits the deck into two perfect piles, so either this is a full false shuffle or deck switch (maybe with a breather to cut to the halfway point), or maybe a bottom stock retention of 3 QS cards on the shuffle with a halo cut and a one card pass to put lady spade on the bottom of one pile and the top and bottom of the other.
Full false shuffles look fakey as hell so I’d be tempted to go with the latter, but if this is an accomplished card magician there’s every possibility that he used a full stack to script every hand of the game, not entirely dissimilar to the last phase of Aunt Mary’s Terrible Secret⁵.
It’s brilliant really. Nearly unrecognisable as a magic trick at all, so no one even looks for the method. I bet it looked like the basement scene from Heretic. I’m so jealous.
It puts me in mind of something I was told on my attempt to visit every brick and mortar magic shop in the UK. In Sheffield, at Magick Enterprises I met the shopkeep who was also involved in several theatrical illusions, including a simulated human sacrifice on a burning altar (skip to 14:14 for that part).
At the end of this anecdote he said:
There’s a lot of interesting things happening in magic away from walking around tables doing card tricks.
I think I’d like to find those places. And if I cant find them… I might have to make one.
¹ Magicians do not usually do this. Indeed some magicians think they need to hire other magicians as lighting techs and sound engineers because of the possibility of some lowly theatre person accidentally learning magical secrets, and as such never encounter any other performance or creative specialists outside of propmakers trying to sell them things.
² Our last topic was a short one about the foundations and history of Zines, and I’m considering making a few of my own in a magical theme, so keep your eyes peeled for that.
³ This is presumably because they were unsure if they were supposed to tell anyone about it. One piece of background I can give is that they are active in the comedy and improv world, but they are not Brennan Lee Mulligan. I mention this final fact on the basis that I hope some of you will doubt me and go away with the belief that I am friends with Brennan Lee Mulligan, and maybe if enough people believe it, maybe it will manifest somehow.
⁴ In this effect Ben turns out all the lights and hands the spectator a matchbox. The spectator takes out a match, lights.it and uses it to light a candle. With this new illumination the spectator can now tip out the matchbox to see all the other matches are already burnt.
⁵ I first saw this routine on David Williamson’s Ridiculous. When I went to YouTube to find a video to link, I could only find a performance by someone else doing it quite badly, practically telegraphing part of the method. For those unaware of it, the routine involves a card game where cards are removed from a shuffled deck 2 at a time. Double reds are a point for one player, double blacks are a point for the other and red black pairs are a point for the magician. One player wins, then the other, and on the final round the magician wins every point as all the cards come out in red black pairs. There’s some very clever maths and a very hard sleight involved in this routine which is surprising when you see what a total goofball David Williamon is. This is the disguise magicians wear.